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Israel tends not to rush to claim responsibility for assassinations and the like. But the reputation of its intelligence services goes before it. Most experts are saying that the fiendishly imaginative nature of the attacks in Lebanon this week, which involved thousands of exploding pagers and walkie talkies carried by members of Hezbollah, makes it odds-on that this was an Israeli operation.

Another thing many academic experts and commentators agree on is that this could be the trigger than sets what for the past year – since Hamas carried out its brutal October 7 attacks in Israel and Israel launched its devastating retaliation on Gaza – has been a fairly consistent set of low-level exchanges of rocket fire and bombardment between the Israel Defense Forces and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

We spoke with Scott Lucas, who has been a regular contributor to our coverage of the conflict in Gaza and has offered valuable insights into its regional implications over the past year. Here he addresses four key questions which give context and significance to the attacks.

Given the widespread assumption that Israel was behind the attacks, he believes that the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is feeling the pressure from his failure to deliver a decisive victory against Hamas in Gaza or return........

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